Walter Cronkite: And That's The Way It Is

I was four years old and sitting on my knees in front of my grandparents' new, black and white, console television. The voice I heard, soothing and calming had undertones of confidence and authority. That is my first recollection of Walter Cronkite and that Autumn day I heard him report on the J. F. Kennedy assassination.

That was it. Forever emblazoned in my psyche was the assuaging southern drawl of Walter Cronkite; the CBS anchor known as the most trusted man in America. In fact he became known by the drop-out-love-child-flower-child hippies and yippies as "Uncle Walter." Who would even come close to that today? Uncle Morley Safer? Uncle Charlie Rose? Uncle Mike Wallace? Uncle Andy Rooney?

It seemed as if I grew up with him. It was his news reports where I learned about the Viet Nam war; and Watergate, Iranian hostage crisis, Apollo 11, Apollo 13 and the moon landing.

He was down to earth and had, it seemed, a kinship with Americans. His bushy eyebrows, woolly mustache and Cary Grant good looks endeared him to Americans. We wanted to trust him. In turn he wanted to deliver the forthright, bona fide news, just the facts. During a time when the powers that be at CBS were beginning to cautiously "report" nightly news, Cronkite hit it head on. Quite often he was asked what award he was most proud of and he'd always say his Emmy for his report on Watergate. And boy did he have Emmys. He had so many Emmy statues he couldn't keep track of them yet the one he beamed at having was for his work reporting on Watergate! That two part investigative report, in part, assisted in toppling a president. He elicited and evoked almost immediate confidence and supposition from his TV viewers. So when he became skeptical in the tumultuous 1960's America sat up and listened. If he reported on the Watergate break in we, quite simply, believed him. Cronkite had power and never exploited it.

As part of his legacy, Cronkite donated his personal papers to the University of Texas at Austin. He helped sponsor an endowment for the University of Southern California's Annenberg Award for excellence in television political journalism and the Arizona State University’s school of journalism which is now known as the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

He wasn't particularly fond of retirement and often lamented he had regretted stepping down from the nightly news within 24 hours of resigning and has "regretted it every day since." He promised that upon his retirement he would continue to follow news developments “from a perch yet to be determined. I just hope that wherever that is, folks will still stop me, as they do today, and ask, ‘Didn’t you used to be Walter Cronkite?’ ”

So I'm thinking over the things that he said...and that's the way it is.